PURPOSE To determine whether trifluorothymidine (TFT) and ganciclovir (GCV) are synergistic against herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1). METHODS TFT and GCV activity against 12 strains of HSV-1 (including an acyclovir-resistant strain) was measured by plaque-forming unit (PFU) inhibition. Cellular toxicity was assessed with an MTT dye reduction assay. Synergism was determined by calculating f...

Antibiotic combinations are used to enhance antibacterial efficacy and to prevent the development of resistance. We have tested a possible synergistic effect of several antibacterial combinations on Bacillus anthracis. The in vitro activities of antibiotic combinations against two strains of B. anthracis, strain Sterne and the Russian anthrax vaccine strain STi, were tested by the fractional in...

In this paper a hybrid technique of Genetic Algorithm and Simulated Annealing (HGASA) is applied for Fractal Image Compression (FIC). With the help of this hybrid evolutionary algorithm effort is made to reduce the search complexity of matching between range block and domain block. The concept of Simulated Annealing (SA) is incorporated into Genetic Algorithm (GA) in order to avoid pre-mature c...

To assess the clinical utility of the crude ethanolic extract of the leaves of Varthemia iphionoides (Compositae), minimal inhibitory concentrations eJ'v1Ies) were determined using agar dilution technique. Accordingly, The MICs of of this plant extract ranged from 0.0313-1 mg/ml for three clinical Staphylacaccus aureus strains and ATCC strains of Bacillus subtilis and Staphylococcus epidermidis...

Fractal Image Coder (FIC) makes use of the self-similarity inside a natural image to achieve high compression ratio and maintain good image quality. In FIC, the most important factor affecting the compression ratio and the image quality is the quantization of the contrast scaling and brightness offset coefficients. Most quantization methods treat the two coefficients independently and quantize ...

In this paper we establish an estimate for the rate of convergence of the Krasnosel’skǐı–Mann iteration for computing fixed points of non-expansive maps. Our main result settles the Baillon–Bruck conjecture [3] on the asymptotic regularity of this iteration. The proof proceeds by establishing a connection between these iterates and a stochastic process involving sums of non-homogeneous Bernoull...

Familial intrahepatic cholestasis (FIC) comprises a group of rare cholestatic liver diseases associated with canalicular transport defects resulting predominantly from mutations in ATP8B1, ABCB11 and ABCB4. Phenotypes range from benign recurrent intrahepatic cholestasis (BRIC), associated with recurrent cholestatic attacks, to progressive FIC (PFIC). Patients often suffer from severe pruritus a...

We study the focused information criterion (FIC) and frequentist model averaging (FMA) and their application to post-model-selection inference for weighted composite quantile regression (WCQR) in the context of the additive partial linear models. With the nonparametric functions approximated by polynomial splines, we show that, under certain conditions, the asymptotic distribution of the FMA WC...